


Disconnect

by Beleriandings



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Brother Feels, Family, Gen, faking your death has consequences, feels in general, stan's early days in the mystery shack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 14:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8211607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Stanford's phone has been disconnected for a long time, but when Stanley connects it again, he gets a phone call he's not expecting.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I headcanon Shermie as older than the twins (as I think it makes more sense with the timeline) not that it matters that much for the purposes of this story.

The telephone had been disconnected for some time, it seemed. 

Stanley stared at the cable on the ground for a while, in some trepidation, before connecting it in at the wall again. 

He wasn’t sure why he had done that; even if anyone were to actually call, he was hardly going to answer the phone, when whoever was on the line was calling for the brother he hadn’t seen in more than ten years. 

(The brother he had lost all over again, so soon. _His fault_ , said the cruel little voice in his head.)

Maybe he had done it because it was so silent in this narrow house with its pitched roof and its cluttered rooms, closing in on him as the snow whispered down outside the windows and the wind wailed. 

Not long after he had connected it again, the phone started ringing. 

Stanley ignored it at first. It rang twelve times, then fell silent. 

A few minutes later, it started ringing again. 

After the fourth phonecall, he picked it up, wondering what the hell he was doing even as he did so. _Was he crazy too, now?_

“….Hello? Pines?”

A crackling at the other end of the line. “…Ford? That you?”

Stanley swallowed nervously, his mind going blank for a long moment. Though the line still crackled with static noise, it was a voice he recognised well enough. He cleared his throat. “….Shermie? Why are you calling?” 

For a moment, nervousness flickered through him; he had impersonated his brother’s voice before, of course he had, _but that had been before_ … 

Still, he told himself, he couldn’t be too far off. This bad signal, this line…. Stanley hadn’t seen Shermie in years, and going by the way Ford seemed to have been living like a shut-in, his twin hadn’t seen or spoken to their older brother either. He didn’t have to tell him anything, he thought, pushing back the acute pang of guilt. Not yet, anyway. 

“I…” A pause long enough that Stanley thought for a moment that the signal had been cut off. “Have… haven’t you heard the news?”

Stanley stared at the wall, thinking. _Play dumb? No, no, if it’s supposed to be Ford, then that wouldn’t cut it. Pretend to have been cut off from the world, then?_ He looked around at the cluttered room, papers and dirty coffee mugs glazed over by a layer of dust. _Well, maybe that would work. The phone seemed to have been disconnected for a while, after all_. 

If he was going to be a coward and lie to his brother, he may as well do it plausibly. 

He cleared his throat again. He’d impersonated Ford plenty of times before when they were kids, of course; what else were twins supposed to do for fun? But never recently. _And never, ever like this_. Already he was wishing he had simply told Shermie the truth. But part of him protested that; _no_ , it said. _Dad already hates you. You don’t need to make another family member hate you._

_Ford hates you, too._

_…Hated you?_

He put the thought from his mind, trying to put on his best Ford voice. “Hmm” he said. “I’ve been very… busy with research lately, Sherman.” He thought of Ford pointing a crossbow at him, the fear in his eyes. “How did you get this number?” he added, hastily. 

“Uh… Ford? You gave it to me, remember?” Shermie’s voice was gentle. “A couple years ago.” A pause. “Ford… I know it’s been a while… I tried to call but these last months I haven’t been able to get through to you…”

 _Months? How long had Ford had the phone disconnected?_ Stanley thought of the wild look in his brother’s eyes. _How long had it been since Ford had shut himself away? And what had he been so afraid of?_

“Yeah” he said gruffly, realising from the static on the line - loud in his ear - that the silence was stretching out. “I… ah… sorry. I’ve been busy. Distracted.”

Another silence, but this one sounded cautious, measured and assessing. “….Yeah, I got that much.” His brother’s tone of voice made it clear he knew that wasn’t all there was to it.

Stanley had to bite his lip to avoid cursing into the receiver. He was doing badly at this, even by his usual standards. A distraction, that was what he needed. “News?” he asked.

“What?”

“Oh, keep up Sherman” he said with exaggerated haughtiness, then gritted his teeth; _too much?_ Imitating Ford’s voice - the voice he would almost certainly never hear again - was harder than he had expected. “You said you had news.”

“I…” another long pause. “….Yeah. Ford, have you… have you been in contact with Stan lately?”

His heart nearly stopped. “No,” he said, too quickly. “You know we haven’t talked in… some time. Why, what has he got himself mixed up in now?”

“Uh…” it sounded like his brother let out his breath in a rush. “…You haven’t been reading the local news, I guess?”

“I don’t… usually bother with it, no.” 

“Well…” Shermie drew an audible breath on the other end of the line. Perhaps it was just the static on the line, but Stanley thought his brother’s voice sounded more hollow than usual. “I found a newspaper at the train station.”

“….What?” 

“I… I found a paper. Oregon Community Watch. Someone had left it in the station, after getting off a train.”

Stanley felt a wave of foreboding, thinking of the newspaper intern he had bribed with the first decent wad of cash he had made in this town, the creased, blurry photo of a wrecked car that he had slipped into a hand, wrapping a roll of bills. _Print the headline as I said, but other than that go crazy, kid. Make up some details, fiery wreckage, splattered blood and brains, that kinda thing._ It had only been meant to keep the cops off him, but he hadn’t expected the news to get out of the state, let alone all the way to New Jersey. He cleared his throat, trying to make sure his voice sounded plausible. “I fail to see what that has to do with anything…”

“Well…” it sounded like Shermie took a deep breath, like a man about to dive into cold water. “There was a story about a car crash, somewhere… somewhere in logging country. Near you, Ford. Just a snippet, but the headline was…” another pause.

Stanley’s blood ran cold, and he found it difficult to get the words out. “What?”

“ _Stan Pines Dead_.” 

There was a long, long silence. 

A crackle on the other end of the line. “Ford? You still there?”

Stanley bit his lip. How would Ford - the _real_ Ford - react to something like that? He found himself barely able to guess. “…Yes. I’m still here.”

“Is…” his brother’s voice was quiet, hollow. “Is it true? Is it him?”

He thought for a long moment. “Yeah” he said, at last, with a sigh. “Yes, it is.”

A small choking noise. “Ford, I…”

“He was coming to see me” said Stanley, his voice like broken glass. He had never heard Ford talk like that, but then, he supposed, neither had Shermie. Nothing like this had ever happened before. “Stanley… crashed his car in the snow.” He carried on almost recklessly, face set now, words coming quicker. “We… tried to get hold of you and Mom, but the phone lines were down… the town was snowed in…”  

Another little sound on the other end of the line, and Stanley pushed on ahead. He was almost afraid to stop speaking lest he break apart entirely, losing resolve and spilling out the truth. About him, about Ford, about what had really happened. Not that Shermie would believe the truth anyway; he’d think it a sick joke, and he’d think Stanley a terrible person. 

Not that Stanley doubted that Shermie thought that already. 

Besides, it was probably true. 

“….Right.” His brother sounded shocked, his voice somehow even more distant than it had been. Stanley imagined Shermie running a nervous hand through slicked-back hair, in that way he always had that had so annoyed their father, on the rare occasions the family had all been together. 

A muffled sound that Stanley couldn’t make out over the bad phone line. Then a long silence. 

“Sorry to tell you like this. After… after so long” said Stanley, feeling his heart cracking even as the word came. “I…. really I am. But…” he felt his own voice stop in his throat for a moment, choking him. “Stanley really… he really is dead. It’s true what you heard. He ain’t… uh… he’s _not_ coming back.”

There was another long, long silence, and Stanley listened to the winter storm howling outside. 

“Stanford, I… we have to talk about a funeral, but there’s Dad, and I don’t know if he’ll - ”

But he heard no more of his brother’s voice, for at that moment there was a crackle of static, a buzzing, and the line went dead, the lights in Ford’s room flickering out.

 _Powercut. Just great._  Well, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about what to do about attending - or not attending - his own funeral for a while. Not until the lights came on, at least. He slammed the phone back down in its cradle with a little too much force, then threw himself down on the couch, pressing his knuckles over his eyes in frustration. At himself, at the whole world, at all the circumstances and all the mistakes that had brought him into this situation. At Ford too, though that brought with it that troublesome stab of pain and loss again, turning the anger into simple sadness, which was worse. 

That felt far, far too much like an ending, like giving up. 

For a long time, he simply lay on the couch as he had those first nights in the house, staring up at the ceiling in the dim room, shadows clotting in the corners of the ceiling and lying heavy over his brother’s possessions that filled every shelf, some tumbling onto the floor. 

The room was untidy, cluttered. Uncharacteristically so. The window was boarded over with rough planks at skewed angles, the nails hammered in half flat, as though in a hurry. All the windows in the house had been like that. The storm had darkened the sky early, and the diffuse light that did come through the coloured glass window was a nauseating mixture of pink, orange and yellow that did nothing to calm the unease that he felt in this place, every moment of the day. He remembered the wildness that danced in his brother’s eyes, and the heavy shadows under them. And the other things; the crossbow that Ford had pointed at his face, examining his eyes with a flashlight. The boarded up windows, the general air of disarray.

_What were you doing, brother? What was that machine for, and why were you so afraid?_

_And where are you now?_

Actually, he thought, one question he could probably answer easily enough; the fear, the paranoia, was probably simple isolation, driving his brother up the wall. Stanley kicked miserably at the bed post. _This place, all alone in the wilderness. The creepy underground lab, the symbols, the codes…_  for the thousandth time he flicked listlessly through the pages of the journal his brother had thrown at him as though it held his life inside, seeing symbols and diagrams and coded messages dance before his eyes without any more comprehension than the first time. _Well, it’s hardly surprising… all that’s enough to drive anyone nuts_. 

Still, the question was pointless anyway. Ford was gone, and he was all alone. 

Besides, right now, he thought morosely as he stared back at the phone, he had more pressing concerns. The family for one. One day, he knew, he’d have to tell them the truth. Mostly for his mother’s sake, and Shermie’s. Certainly not for his father’s. Probably not for Ford’s either, as either way it couldn’t help him now. 

_Maybe slightly for Ford’s sake._

_…Maybe more than slightly_.

Still, he ran his hands over his face wearily at the very mere thought of how that conversation - _confession?_ \- might go. 

_…Did there really have to be a confession at all, though?_

The thought crept into his mind, traitorous and dangerous. He lay down on the couch, his eyes wide and staring up at the ceiling even as he had lain that very first lonely, sleepless night, as he turned it over in his head. He held the book in his hands, very tightly. _No, there didn’t have to be a confession_. He could impersonate Ford, the reclusive scientist to his family, the eccentric stranger with a bunch of mysterious secrets to the townspeople, until he figured this out. 

He could bring his brother back. It was something he had considered before, all through those long nights. He could just _not_ tell them, not until his brother was at his side again, and damn the consequences. 

It would mean a lot of lying, he knew; even as he considered it, the sheer scale of the scam he was trying to pull off became even clearer. It would mean so much more than just lying to the people of the town, scamming them out of their money for a look at the weird stuff Ford had filling up this place. 

He sat up, shivering in the darkened room. After a moment, he felt the now somewhat familiar rumbling and whirring from several floors down as Ford’s backup generator kicked in, and the lights flickered on again. This had been happening all winter, and he still had no idea what powered that thing. 

Still, he knew; he would have to learn. He had to learn a lot of things, if he was going to get his brother back.  _I got us both into this situation; this time, I’ll sure as hell fix it_. 

But until then, he would absolutely lie to everyone about what he had done, about what had happened. There was no sense upsetting his mother, the other brother he had barely gotten to know, just because he was an idiot and had done everything wrong, had made mistakes at every turn. 

After all, there was one thing he was good for, and it was lying. And if it could help even a little, then he would do it. 

He would fix this. 


End file.
